Archive for July 26, 2007

JOURNAL ARTICLE #2

July 26, 2007 · Filed under JOURNAL ARTICLES

JOURNAL ARTICLE

 

TITLE OF THE ARTICLE: PREHISTORY IN THE CALL TO ABRAHAM

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: LYLE ESLINGER- (Not enough history about him)-Not available

He is part and parcel of the Department of Religious Studies, The University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA: SEMEIA- AN EXPERIMENTAL JOURNAL FOR BIBLICAL CRITICISM, VOLUME 6, 1976

URL: NONE

OUTLINE OF THE ARTICLE:

  1. INTRODUCTION
  2. ABRAHAM’S CALL AND GRACE
  3. ABRAHAM’S ELECTION IN CONTEXT

- Rhetoric of the Call

- Body Language of the Response

4. NARRATIVE CONTEXT OF THE CALL

- Lives of the Patriarchs

- The Genesis Pre-History

5. ABRAHAM IN HYPERCHRONIC CONTEXT

WHAT THE ARTICLE IS ALL ABOUT:

1. INTRODUCTION

The biblical story of Abraham provides an insight into the birth of the gods from the womb of human optimism. Religious optimism is an unexpected answer to environment insufficiency. One way that imagination has met compulsion’s demands was to conceive a plethora of superhuman agents within and eventually behind natural manifestations of power. There is the recurrent mismatch between environmental obstacles and the ineluctable quest for a better life awakens awareness of the need of an agent to overcome the obstacles.

In the so-called Abrahamic traditions the matter of agency is consistently resolved in favor of divine rather than human agency.

 

2. ABRAHAM’S CALL AND GRACE

The Genesis Pre-history weighs the advantages and liabilities of achieving the goals of biologically based optimism by divine and human agents. The story and Abraham and Sara is not only integral to this narrative mythologizing, it is in the culmination. Abraham’s unmerited election has fed the development of exclusivism and xenophobia among the self-perceived elect, careful consideration of the pre-text to Abraham’s call reveals another aspect in which there are clear pragmatic reasons for God’s choice of Abraham.

 

 

 

3. ABRAHAM’S ELECTION IN CONTEXT

The archetype and folk-historical value of Abraham’s call derives from a restriction to issues of interest in devotional and theological contexts. The promise to Abram points in the direction of Abram becoming a great people the promise can apply to the people of Israel only at the height of its prosperity. Contextual awareness is essential to an appreciation of ancient mythology embedded in literature but historical-critical reading duplicates the traditional predilection to turn too quickly to its own concerns, away from the embedded evidence of literal detail, narrative structure, overarching mythological concern.

- Rhetoric of the Call

Abraham’s Rhetoric call by God is “get yourself from your land, from your kin, from your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). In the ancient social order, as for most humans who have ever lived, family and territory were an individual’s primary hold on life-sustaining resources and bulwark against adversarial encroachments. This is what God asks Abraham to renounce, no less. The power of a god far surpasses the collective might of other humans. But why does God require Abraham’s isolation from other humans?

- Body Language of the Response

Abraham’s response is a model of faith traditionally. The precise phonetic correspondence between the divine command, “go get yourself” and Abram’s response “so he went” is venerated as a most exacting obedience. God’s fancy of an isolated devotee going along with his god are matched by Abram’s and his tribe’s collective presence. Abram’s social bridges are portable, not burnt, setting a course within which faith’s mainstream has since flowed. What drives both the call and the response is singular and human: the need for security.

 

4. NARRATIVE CONTEXT OF THE CALL

- Lives of the Patriarchs

The story of the issues of the call continues to the shape and pattern of Abraham’s life as a whole. Demands for self resignation are matched by further offers of reward and Abraham’s story is famous for repeated promises of the good that will come from submission to God. The story of Abram and Sarai turns on the matter of security. Promises of the land, wealth and progeny are subsets of this primary concern

- The Genesis Pre-History

God’s motive for calling Abram is perplexing. As God he has the need to ask anything of anyone, hence the traditional belief that the call is unconditioned. The immediate narrative context supplies no obvious information and so has not been scrutinized. But in the light of the parallel between God’s response to the generation before the flood and to the tower builders, one thing stands out about Abraham’s call. In events leading to the tower confrontation humans had rebuilt their population base, the foundation of collective human agency. The tower project demonstrates their potential. The mythology of agency provides the logic of confrontation, explaining why God targets their collective cognitive capacity, not the tower as one might expect.

 

- Abram in Hyperchronic Context

The anxieties about the mythology of agency are cross-cultural, suggesting an archaic origin (the common antecedent to cultural diversity, expressed in cultural universals) and the need to attend to an archaic chronological frame in order to understand them. Classical literatures like the Bible are rich accumulations of culture’s archaic depths, offering comparatively innocent reflections of this pre-historic past. Like depth psychology, hyperchrony considers classical cultures of the agricultural age in the light of the archaic past, while eschewing the tangle of primal events, psychic layers and archetypal structures that fossilized into depth psychology’s meta-myths.

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SEMINAR QUESTION 12

July 26, 2007 · Filed under SEMINAR DISCUSSION

 

Which English Version of the Bible do you use for the following: preaching/teaching, group devotional, personal devotional, easy reading, quoting in letters? And Why?

Basicaly, I use the King James Version (KJV) for Preaching, Teaching, group devotion, Personal devotion, easy reading, quoting in letters and every other activity which demands a reading of the bible.

For my money, the KJV Bible is very easy for my reading and memorizing and the deeper researches I had made is also evident that KJV’s Version is the most closest to the original manuscripts. To boot my apology, I have immensely identified diverse mistakes in other versions which have enormously diluted many biblical truths found in lother versions. By position is embedded on the following findings”

DANGER IN OTHER VERSIONS (HISTORY)

The modern contemporary translations are based on the work of two nineteenth century Greek scholars from England–B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort. Westcott and Hort, were apparently deeply drawn in the occult, hated the Textus Receptus Greek text, out of which the King James Bible was decoded, so they fabricated THEIR OWN Greek text. This Westcott and Hort Greek text was based primarily on two very unseemingly unconventional fourth century ROMAN CATHOLIC manuscripts: Codex Vaticanus (discovered in the Pope’s library in 1481) and Sinaiticus (discovered in 1859 in a trash can at St. Catherine’s monastery on Mt. Sinai).

HOW THE KJV BIBLE WAS GOTTEN

In July 1604, King James the King of England wrote to Bishop Bancroft demanding him to opt for 54 able and scholarly men who would carry the burden of translation. Among these chosen vessels, a couple died before the commencement of the work and a few were incapacitated to participate because of numerous commitments. The 47 remaining scholars (according to Eldred Thomas in his book ‘Bible Versions’) comprised of six Bishops and 41 were university professors, of which 30 held doctorates and 23 were unusually gifted in Hebrew and Greek. The 47 were allotted and divided into six groups (two at Westminster, two at Oxford and two at Cambridge) who were employed under some 15 severe and stringent guidelines, one of which was that they were to keep the old ecclesiastical words. For example, ‘church’ was not to be translated ‘congregation’. Apparently, none of the translators received any pay for their work, as they gladly volunteered their time.

WHY IT IS USEFUL FOR ME (MY PERSUASIONS)

King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is traditionally the foremost English translation. The KJV is measured as one of the masterpieces of early modern English literature, although most modern readers find the language a bit behind the times and occasionally dense. There have been various successive English translations, many of which have in a great deal borrowed from the KJV.

Like the earlier English translations such as Tyndale’s and the Geneva Bible, the King James Version was translated primarily from Greek and Hebrew texts, with only secondary reference to the Latin Vulgate. The King James Version’s Old Testament is based on the Masoretic Text,the New Testament is based on the Textus Receptus, and the Apocrypha is based on the Septuagint. The King James Version is a formal translation of these base sources; words implied but not actually in the original source are specially marked in most printings (either by being inside square brackets, or as italicized text).

The King James Version has traditionally been appreciated for the quality of the prose and poetry in the translation. However, the English language has changed since the time of its publication, and the King James Version employs words and grammatical structures that may be foreign to modern readers. For example, the King James Version uses the second person singular pronouns, such as “thou“. Some words used in the King James Version have changed meaning since the translation was made; for example “replenish” is used in the translation in the sense of “fill” where the modern verb means “to refill”, and “even” (a word very often introduced by the translators and thus italicized) is mostly used in the sense of “namely” or “that is”. Because of this, some modern readers find the King James Version more difficult to understand than more recent translations.

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